Jan. 15, 2019 Quartz News -If you’re on a beach late one evening, and you’re very lucky, you might someday see the birth of baby sea turtles.

The sand beneath your feet wriggles inexplicably, and tiny little creatures appear by the dozens from a hidden nest, left by their mother when they were eggs. Vulnerable and sweet, the hatchlings scurry to the water’s edge under cover of falling dusk, hoping to avoid predators. There, they throw themselves into the ocean, small and solitary, to begin the dangerous and lonely journey of becoming a turtle. Watching such a scene makes being born human look like a very cushy gig.

Oregon Public Broadcasting , Dec. 29, 2018 - There is a happy corner of the Internet today, and it is celebrating the first North Atlantic right whale calf sighting of the season. The news is a big deal, considering the fact that the North Atlantic right whale is critically endangered, its total population is only about 450 and not a single right whale calf was spotted last season.

Oregon Public Broadcasting , Dec. 26, 2018 - Japan is withdrawing from an international group that bans commercial whaling, saying it will resume commercial hunts for the first time in 30 years next July. Japan will leave the International Whaling Commission, which put a moratorium on commercial whaling in the 1980s.

“Japan argues that it has a long tradition of whaling, even though Japanese today eat very little whale meat,” NPR’s Anthony Kuhn reports from Tokyo.

ENN Network, Dec. 21, 2018 - The mass death of flying foxes in extreme heat in North Queensland last month underscores the importance of University of Queensland wildlife research released today.

A study led by UQ School of Earth and Environmental Science researcher Dr Sean Maxwell has synthesized more than 70 years of research to quantify the responses of various species.

“The growing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as cyclones, droughts and floods is causing unpredictable and immediate changes to ecosystems and obstructing existing management efforts,” Dr Maxwell said.

Nov. 5, 2018 -The critically endangered American red wolf might have been saved from extinction.

In a scathing court decision Monday, a federal judge in North Carolina ripped the Interior Department’s management of the last red wolf population in the wild, saying that an agency sworn to uphold a congressional mandate to preserve the animals violated it over and over, and even gave private landowners the right to shoot them.

Oct. 18, 2018 -The Dusky Gopher Frog, once endemic to the longleaf pine savannas of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana — and now listed among the 100 most endangered species on earth — is tiny, dark and warty. The creature is often described as both secretive and shockingly loud, with a rumbling, back-of-the-throat mating call that is uncannily close to the human snore. It hides from the sun almost its whole life, finding shelter in burned-out tree stumps. And although it’s armed against danger (its glands secrete poison), in the presence of a predator, the three-inch-long frog lifts its front legs to cover its eyes, like a child pretending to be invisible: You can’t see it if it can’t see you.

Oct. 17, 2018 -At least 30% of the world’s crops and 90% of all plants require cross-pollination to spread and thrive, making bees an important part of any ecosystem.

Pollinators, and bees specifically, work to create many benefits for humans and the Earth we live on, and one of those is to increase the health of your garden.

Whether you are a fan of honey, want to incorporate more beautiful flowers into your space or love being able to have a positive impact on the environment, beekeeping can prove to be a fun, sustainable hobby while also providing you with a way to improve the health of your garden and home.

Oct. 1, 2018 -The Seattle Times has been covering the plight of the southern resident killer whales, which have lost three members this summer. Another orca, K25, is ailing — while at least three females are pregnant.

The Pacific Northwest’s orcas are at grave risk of extinction.

Here’s a primer on why:

Who are they?

The southern resident orcas are a unique population of killer whales. They are critically endangered, with an extended family of only 74 members in three pods, named J, K and L.

Sept. 20,2018 -Urged on by the oil and gas industry, the Trump administration is moving to drastically weaken the Endangered Species Act. But the act, writes a former U.S. Interior Secretary, has saved hundreds of species that might now be extinct, while allowing for well-managed development.

Since taking office, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke has set out to eviscerate the act by restricting and manipulating scientific research, by narrowing the review process, and by hiring underlings dedicated to its destruction. And now Republicans in Congress, who realize they could lose their majorities in the November midterm elections, are threatening to join the wrecking crew with a host of destructive amendments that would further weaken the act.

Sept. 19, 2018 -Identifying matching elephant DNA in different shipments of tusks can help scientific sleuths connect the shipments to the same ivory trafficking cartel, a new study finds. That technique has already revealed the presence of three major interconnected cartels that are active in Africa, researchers report September 19 in Science Advances.

Sept. 6, 2018 — One fine Hawaiian day in 2015, Geoff Zahn and Anthony Amend set off on an eight-hour hike. They climbed a jungle mountain on the island of Oahu, swatting mosquitoes and skirting wallows of wild pigs. The two headed to the site where a patch of critically endangered Phyllostegia kaalaensis had been planted a few months earlier. What they found was dispiriting.

Essay by Rachel Clark: Sept. 5, 2018 — Early this summer, riding ocean swells just west of Washington State’s San Juan Island in a whale-watching vessel and scanning the waves for a glimpse of glistening black fins, I found myself in a difficult place.

Some chaperone-coordinators and I had brought a group of low-income, “first-generation-to-college” high-school students all the way from north Idaho to see the Southern Resident killer whales, our region’s iconic orca. The students had spent the previous two weeks learning about this unique population of whales in our program’s pilot curriculum, Killer Whales, Salmon & You. From the looks on their faces, our group of youth — many grappling with intensely stressful situations in their lives — obviously felt invested in seeing these whales.

Sept. 1, 2018 — The terrain in Budo-Su-ngai Padi National Park in southern Thailand is so steep in places that you can reach out and touch the path in front of you. With each step on the rain-drenched ground, you risk sliding back down. Insects buzz in nose and ears, and if you stop long enough to look around, you’ll see an army of land leeches inching their wormy, blood-hungry little bodies toward you.

Aug. 30, 2018 -The vast majority of lemur species are on the edge of extinction, experts warn. But not every lemur species faces a grim future. There may be as many as 1.3 million white-fronted brown lemurs still in the wild, for example, and mouse lemurs may number more than 2 million, a Duke-led study has shown.

In a study published August 30 in the Journal of Biogeography, researchers show that lemurs are less abundant in areas that lack certain tree species -- even when environmental conditions such as temperature, precipitation and elevation are otherwise suitable.

Using this relationship, the team was able to come up with the first estimates of total population size for some lesser-known species, such as Crossley’s dwarf lemur. These estimates can be critical baseline data for managing what’s left.

GRIMSEY ISLAND, Iceland, Aug. 29, 2018 — Puffins are in trouble.

The birds have been in precipitous decline, especially since the 2000s, both in Iceland and across many of their Atlantic habitats. The potential culprits are many: fickle prey, overfishing, pollution. Scientists say that climate change is another underlying factor that is diminishing food supplies and is likely to become more important over time. And the fact that puffins are tasty, and thus hunted as game here, hardly helps.

Aug. 10, 2018 -A team of whale experts has injected an ailing orca with antibiotics in a rare emergency effort to save her.

NOAA Fisheries says the international team reached 3½-year-old orca known as J50 Thursday in the waters near Washington state’s San Juan Island.

A veterinarian examined the orca. The team of experts gave her a dose of antibiotics through a dart and took a breath sample to help assess whether she has an infection.

Aug. 9, 2018 -A gene that helps mammals break down certain toxic chemicals appears to be faulty in marine mammals — potentially leaving manatees, dolphins and other warm-blooded water dwellers more sensitive to dangerous pesticides.

The gene, PON1, carries instructions for making a protein that interacts with fatty acids ingested with food. But that protein has taken on another role in recent decades: breaking down toxic chemicals found in a popular class of pesticides called organophosphates. As the chemicals drain from agricultural fields, they can poison waterways and coastal areas and harm wildlife, says Wynn Meyer, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Pittsburgh.

Aug. 4, 2018 -People are quick to recognize lemurs, thanks in no small part to the "Madagascar" franchise. Despite their impressive media profile, however, nearly every species of lemur is in danger of extinction.

Those are the provisional findings of a recent lemur workshop led by the IUCN Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group (PSG), and the findings have resulted in the reclassification of 105 species as either critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable on the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species.

"This is, without a doubt, the highest percentage of threat for any large group of mammals and for any large group of vertebrates,"said Russ Mittermeier, chief conservation officer for Global Wildlife Conservation and chair of the PSG.

Aug. 3, 2018 -Ruben de Kock has been training South Africa’s park rangers for over two decades — but last month was the first time one of his former students was killed on the job.

The July 19 incident, in which 34-year-old Respect Mathebula died in a shootout, marks the first instance in 50 years of a ranger being killed by poachers in Kruger National Park. Yet given the intensity of rhinoceros poaching in the region, the milestone is as surprising as it is tragic.

Aug. 2, 2018 -Last week angry headlines around the world decried the news that the Trump administration had issued trophy-import permits for 38 lions killed by 33 hunters — including many high-rolling Republican donors — between 2016 and 2018.

Lions (Panthera leo leo) have experienced massive population drops over the past two decades. The big cats gained some protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2016, but the Obama-era regulations still allowed some hunting and trophy imports as long as the host countries could prove that their hunts were sustainable. The Trump administration did away with that requirement last year and instead decreed that it would allow imports on a “case-by-case basis.”

Aug. 1, 2018 -What was once the king of the king penguin colonies has lost 85 percent or more of its big showy birds since the 1980s, a drop perhaps big enough to shrink the whole species population by a third.

In its glory days, an island called Île aux Cochons in the southern Indian Ocean ranked as the largest colony of king penguins. Satellite data suggest numbers peaked at around 500,000 breeding pairs amidst a total of 2 million birds in the 1980s, says seabird specialist Henri Weimerskirch based at University of La Rochelle with CNRS, the French national research service.